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"That is the quartermaster," Cade says. "He has the master chart. Every team may ask him three questions. Yes or no questions only, and he will answer every one of them."

Somebody down the row starts to grin.

"And," Cade says, "he is permitted to lie to you once."

The grin dies.

"Three questions. One lie. He picks when. Go."

Six teams tear six bags open.

I do not open ours.

"Junie."

"Wait."

"Junie, they have gone."

"Ghorlan, wait."

Because there is a man on a stump forty feet away in a poncho, and there is a queue forming at that stump, and I have ten days of nothing but people, and a stump with a queue at it is the single best thing that has happened to me since the bus.

The Trells go first. Margaux Farrow goes second. Rooney Pike goes third and talks with his hands. Marisol Arbogast goes fourth and asks something short and turns away almost immediately with her jaw set.

And I stand at the back of the Flat in the dark, out of the work light, and take inventory.

The quartermaster answers the Trells' three questions with his hands in his sleeves. Same with Margaux. On Rooney's second question, his right hand comes out of his sleeve and goes to the clipboard, and he turns the clipboard about ten degrees, and then he answers.

On Marisol's first question he does the same thing. Hand out. Clipboard turn. Answer.

He does it twice in eleven minutes and he does not do it any of the other times.

It is not a tell about lying. It is far better than that. It is a tell about consulting. He turns the clipboard when he has to look at the master chart to answer honestly, because the honest answer lives on the paper and he does not carry the whole ridge in his head. When he lies he does not turn anything, because a lie does not require a source document.

So the lie is the answer he gives fast, from nothing, with his hands in his sleeves.

Which means I do not have to guess when he lies.

I have to make him lie when I want him to.

"Open it," I say.

Ghorlan opens the bag and unfolds the chart under his headlamp, and I go over his arm, and there are our three marks: one at the head of the north drainage, one on the scree above the Flat, one down at the creek fork.

"The scree one is wrong," Ghorlan says immediately.

"How?"

"Because there is no cache on that scree. I have been on that scree. It is a forty degree slope of loose rock with nothing on it to hang a bag from and nothing to bury a bag in, and if you put a cache there it would be at the bottom of it by Day Two."

"Ghorlan, that is the best sentence anyone has said to me in ten days."

We go to the stump.

"Three questions," the quartermaster says, hands in sleeves.

"First question." I get my hands into my pockets. "Is the bad mark on our chart the one on the scree?"